


Under the Bridge

by Argyle



Category: A Separate Peace
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2004-07-26
Updated: 2004-07-26
Packaged: 2019-10-25 17:16:42
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 941
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17729429
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Argyle/pseuds/Argyle
Summary: When you really love something, it loves you back in whatever way it has to love.





	Under the Bridge

_“...when you really love something, then it loves you back in whatever way it has to love.”_ \-- A Separate Peace, Chapter 8

 

“Not bad,” Finny said, his brow furrowing as he lazily clicked his stopwatch. “But really Gene, I think you have it in you to run all the way to Albuquerque. You just need more practice.”

“Sure,” I breathed, setting my hand against the heaving motion of my chest. “Exactly how many times have I heard that today?”

“Give it up.”

I nodded, sighing as I fell back upon the coarse trunk of the tree, relieved to feel the pressures of the lengthy run fading from my legs. “Sell, more likely.”

“You said it,” he quipped, dropping the watch into his pocket and arching his back as though he had at last been lured from the arms of a dream.

Pulling the towel from the fold of my collar, I dashed it across my brow, at once feeling my skin prickle in the winter chill. As my eyes scanned the frozen sweep of the glade, I imagined myself to be caught within the growing shadows of another Saturday afternoon. The snow and sky engulfed my senses, leaving little room for fear and obligation, and there was only Finny.

Yes, Finny, who continued much as he always had, sprightly and droll, though his steps now came at a slower pace and the silver shard of his tongue had begun to tarnish. As he had bestowed me with his athletic aspirations, urging me on through my own denials of fortune, I could only yield, moving forward to an unseen resolution.

Weeks had passed, and time only strengthened Finny’s ideal over my own as with the infinite line of the horizon. I took to his image as rapidly as I had with the donning of his clothes during the long stretch of his absence. Indeed, I sold myself to him as I had sold myself to his ruin during those endless summer days, in dreams and waking. At any other moment, Finny’s fall from the lofty branches of the great tree could have been my own, and as I watched his recovery, I realized that it was.

Now he was beside me, a bridge that hung low over the tempest, and I knew that he was the only thing left.

Finny laughed, the jagged notes suspended as echoes in the still air, and jabbed his elbow against my side. “What’re you looking for?”

“Oh,” I hesitated, my eyes crossing to him from the darkening expanse of the forest. “Leper mentioned that there was a beaver dam up river somewhere. I thought I might be able to spot the trail that he’d found.”

Shaking his head, Finny grinned, his features thin and weary. “ _Trail_? Oh, hell,” he sighed. “What’re you _really_ looking for?” The branches above us creaked with the icy burden of their boughs and the distant hope of spring’s warmth. My mind was swept by images of the elm in April, lush with fresh growth and promise just as Finny now stood with me, his breath appearing in white, tapered talons before him, a phantom willed from beyond the present. “Gene?”

I swallowed roughly, still fastened within the brilliant reach of his gaze, green glazed and reddened with the passage of the day, effort, and faith, glinting from the dark crease of his lashes and the ashen curve of his cheek. “I don’t know,” I said at length, shrugging absently as I looked away.

Finny smiled, tightly gripping his walking stick and bracing it against the ground as he moved beside me. His shoulder was then pressed to forward and his hand wound across my back, his gloved fingers spread apart and wavering gently with the cold. My heart pounded within my chest, sounding in my ears as his lips grazed across my own. Seconds laced together, coiling and becoming mapped points of light that hung as distant western stars. There seemed to be some urgency to the air as it hung before us, twining with the warmth of his spirit to the frost of my own, and with the hem of the encroaching darkness, I felt as though my heart had been irrevocably tendered.

As we broke apart, the season’s curtain had forever closed against my thoughts. Perhaps Finny realized this as he straightened the knot of his scarf at his throat.

_There isn’t time_ , he seemed to say, his vision of peace momentarily stretching beyond its bounds as his eyes clouded and his cheeks flushed. _You must see it_.

Of course, it was Finny’s lop-sided smirk that broke apart my concentration. “Hungry?” he asked with a brisk nod as though unveiling a new scene or re-establishing an old one. “You know, I’ll bet it’ll be chicken livers at the dining hall again tonight. Those cooks really know how to treat a guy.” With that, he stuck out his tongue, gagging irreverently as he displayed the whites of his eyes.

“Yeah.” I coughed, feeling my frame buckle slightly beneath the woolen folds of my coat as I heard the hollow chime of my own voice, dusted by wind and frost.

Finny started forward, his shoulders set and his face held to the distant form of the school as he leaned heavily upon his stick and the snow underfoot. Devon stood as a stretch of red bricks and remorse before us, its spires alone seeming to hold the weight of the winter, a thing at once draped by the formulas of the past and the drums that seized the horizon.

“Let’s go!” he shouted, not looking back, and I was already gone.


End file.
